Voicemail allows users to call a central number and leave a message for a particular person, team, or service. For instance, you may want to set up a voicemail box for particular volunteers, such as your adoption counselor or your public relations volunteer. Or you may want a voicemail for lost and found pets, adoptions, information about adoption events, and so forth. Or you may want to have only one general voicemail box. All of these options are available with our service.

Benefits of the Voicemail Service

The Voicemail Service gives you a voicemail service, not a telephone service. That means there is no ringing telephone. Your caller never reaches a live person, however, you can receive alerts with the messages and immediately return a call, if needed. The benefits of this service are:

No more passing a cell phone back and forth between volunteers

No more dependence on one person to answer calls and send a text or email to the appropriate volunteer

Access to the messages by selected or all volunteers

Alerts to the appropriate volunteer or volunteers when a message is left and the alert can include a recording of the message

We have a video about the Voice Mail service and a few other of our services:

Considerations before setting up your service

Before you begin to set up your voicemail service, consider the following:

How many menu options (mailboxes) do you want?

Which mailboxes will have a voice mailbox? Some options may have a greeting only, and others will also accept voice mail messages.

Who (if anyone) will receive email or text alerts when a message is left in a mailbox?

We recommend you write out (or type into a document) the main greeting and each of the mailbox greetings. In the future, if you need to update any of the greetings you can simply update your documents and rerecord.

If you don't configure the mailbox to delete the audio recording it will still be available over the phone or on the web. You will need to delete the messages yourself so that the mailbox doesn’t fill up (maximum of 100 messages in each mailbox). Please see the section of this guide about deleting messages for help.